Elephants are highly intelligent and social animals that live in close-knit family groups, roam vast acres, and need to live in warm climates. 

Zoos, including the Woodland Park Zoo located in damp, rainy Seattle, cannot provide the environment for elephants to live healthy lives. And some zoos have taken this to heart, closed their elephant exhibits, and sent their elephants to live in sanctuaries.

As stated in a recent article in City Living Seattle by Christie Lagally, “a recent survey commissioned by the Friends of Woodland Park Zoo Elephants shows that 62% of Seattle voters believe the elephants should be moved to a sanctuary immediately.”

To date, 27 zoos have closed or plan to close their elephant exhibits.  Click here to find out which ones.

There is enough suffering in the world.

You can make a difference to help end the suffering of these wonderful, intelligent animals.

Please add your voice to eliminate elephant breeding and housing at your local zoo.  If the zoo really wants to help elephants, it should follow the lead of the NYC Bronx Zoo and place money for helping preserve elephants in the wild in Asia and Africa.

More information can be found at:

• Community Coalition for Elephant Retirement
• Friends of Woodland Park Zoo Elephants
• In Defense of Animals

Easy & Quick Steps You Can Take Now:

1) Write your local council members and local zoo letting them know you want to see their elephant exhibits closed, their breeding programs stopped, and their elephants sent to a sanctuary accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries as soon as possible.  

2) If you live in King County and/or Seattle, click here for a list of council members to contact.  You can email your support—even if it is just one sentence—“Please send Woodland Park Zoo’s elephants (Bamboo, Watoto, and Chai) to a sanctuary accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries as soon as possible.”  

3) “Like” the Facebook page for the Community Coalition for Elephant Retirement

4) “Like” the Facebook page for the Friends of the Woodland Park Zoo Elephants

5) Tell others about this issue and share this blog post to help spread the word in helping these magnificent animals!

Your actions do make a difference!  Thank you for taking part to help end suffering in this world!

NOTE: On 4/25/2014, Alyne Fortgang of Friends of Woodland Park Zoo Elephants (FWPZE) told me that FWPZE is beginning a round of meetings in the next two weeks  with Seattle council members starting with Jean Godden.  Thus, this is a pivotal time for you to contact King County and City of Seattle council members to add your voice in helping to end the suffering of the WPZ elephants!

The Bellevue Art Museum (BAM) in Bellevue, WA continues its tradition of exhibiting high-quality and diverse work by extremely talented craftspeople.  

I love contemporary crafts—so full of texture, quirkiness, and ingenuity.  I look forward to the day when crafts are given as much respect and admiration as what is deemed fine art.

Here's BAM's current lineup:

*Crafting a Continuum—My favorite of the four exhibits.  It includes 60+ pieces drawn from the Arizona State University Art Museum’s contemporary craft collection of more than 5,000 objects. It’s a wonderful exhibit that’s too diverse and difficult to describe here.  So do yourself a favor and go see this exhibit before it closes on April 27, 2014.  Learn more here.

*Fragile Fortress—Wood carvings by Dan Webb. An interesting mixture of the finely carved juxtapositioned with rough, unfinished wood—reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Blockhead Slave sculpture.  Some of his pieces have a nightmarish quality and yet, strangely, do not incite fear.  

Works include realistic hands attached by carved wooden rings to roughly hewn wood pillars.  The rings are thick, such as ones used on the chains attached to manacles on convicts in the past. Several strands of these same wooden rings with heavy looking padlocks form long chains running from floor to ceiling.  It’s ironically titled, Rosary.   A beautifully carved open-winged dove rests on a wood chunk.  A heart-shaped balloon of wood echoing the crinkliness of helium balloons found in card stores seems to float in the air.  Delicate dandelions sprout from a redwood block.  This exhibit runs until June 15, 2014.  Learn more here. 

*Life—Ceramic sculptures by Kathy Venter. Over 30 figurative life-sized sculptures, mostly of nude women.  After firing and reassembling the parts into complete figures (the figures are too large to fire in the kiln fully assembled), a mixture of white and dental plaster is applied.  The seemingly random placement of the mixture on the sculptures and its texture adds great visual and tactile appeal.   

Throughout the exhibit, sculptures stand, sit, or recline on the floor.  Several are heads and upper torsos.  Like circus acrobats, a few hang dramatically in space, casting interesting shadows against the walls and floors.  This exhibit runs until June 15, 2013. Learn more here.

*At Your Service—Plates as sculpture from a variety of artists.  This exhibit gives you a whole new appreciation of the plate and what can be done with it.  

I particularly enjoyed Gesine Hackenberg Makkum Plooishotel’s drilling of plates and making rings and necklaces from the circles she extracts as well as Amelia Toelke’s Light and Shadow, Part 2.  Amelia covers plates with faux gold leaf, breaks them along clean lines, and then re-assembles them into a simple, eye-catching pattern adorning BAM's wall.  While this picture from the BAM’s website gives you a taste, it does not do justice to the beauty of the piece.  This exhibit runs until September 21, 2014.  Learn more here.

Take some time to enjoy these exhibits; you’ll be glad you made the trip to BAM! 

Love to marvel at the marvels of science and technology?  Does time travel, emotional artificial intelligence, and way out-of-the-box experiments intrigue you?

Then, you’ll want to watch the Sci-Fi series Eureka. 

Eureka is set in a fictional small town in Oregon.  It's full of quirky scientific geniuses that are constantly creating havoc with their high tech experiments.  

Full of street smarts, common sense, and humility, Sheriff Jack Carter, a man the town considers of average intelligence, is the one that consistently finds a way to solve the many problems that arise and thus saves the day.

Yet, he can't do it alone.  Luckily, he has help from several genius friends.

Enjoy watching all five seasons of this fun, wacky, clever series!

Click on the above DVD covers to learn more.  (Affiliate links)

Every Sunday from January through November, there are free walking tours from 1PM to 2:30PM at the University of Washington (UW) Arboretum.  A volunteer leads each tour which starts at the Graham Visitor Center. Each month a different area of the arboretum is featured. Directions and maps can be found here. 

In March, my dog and I enjoyed a tour which featured the tour guide’s favorite plants.  Not being a botanist and not wanting to take notes, but just enjoy the walk itself—I cannot tell you the names of any of the species that she pointed out.  Incidentally, they all seemed to have difficult names to remember, spell, as well as to pronounce.

What I did learn:

*  The UW Arboretum is 230 acres.  The land is owned by the City of Seattle and the plantings are owned by the UW.

* As a species, magnolias go back 58 million years.

* Beetles existed before bees.

* Cherry blossom tree trunks have horizontal striations to their bark.

* Seattle is not such a great place for cherry blossom tree health because it is so wet and damp.

* Horse and buggy races used to be held on the main thoroughfare—Azalea Way.

* New trails within the arboretum will be created as part of the light rail system sited on the UW’s main campus.

* There are promiscuous flowers in the Winter Flower Garden.  (Yes, some difficult to remember name so I can’t include it here, though I do include a photograph of the flowers in the slideshow at the end of this blog post).

As described on the UW Arboretum's website, April through June tour topics include the following:

April is the month to see Rhododendrons in bloom.  Arboretum weekend walks will feature some of the over 1,800 Rhododendron species in the UW Botanic Garden collection. The April tour title “Rum Dum Rhodies” honors the Rum Dum Rhodie club who practiced hybridization in a friendly spirit of competition.

May is when most plants are in blossom and so the May tour title is "Flower Power." Arboretum weekend walks will wind among the many flowering plants in the arboretum. Tour guides will discuss some of the flowering plants as well as teach visitors the workings of flowers through fun experiments and discussions about pollination.

June is a perfect month to check out the Pacific Connections Garden with a tour title of the same name. Tour guides will take visitors to see plants used for various display gardens of Chile, China, Australia, New Zealand, and in the northwest. The tour will also include a walk through the newly planted New Zealand forest area to show off new acquisitions and see how the forest is faring.

Information about other events at the arboretum can be found here.  

So make some time to visit the wonderful UW Arboretum.  Whether with a tour guide or not, it’s the perfect place for ambling, picnicking, or just sitting on a park bench enjoying the arboretum's vast beauty.